Rejecting an easily definable genre or style, Ode to the Unpraised: Stories and Lessons from Women I Know by Abena Beloved Green blends poetry and interviews to tell the stories of women in Green’s life, ranging from reflections on their lives to practical advice for life. This is both experimental and familiar, pulling poetry from the stories of friends, aunts, mothers, and community leaders.…
Marvin Bell died yesterday. A poetic giant has fallen. His Dead Man poems are everything good poetry is about: deeply imagistic, humane, formally ambitious, culturally significant, political without pretension, and on and on. It is the work of a lifetime. His death made me realize most of my poetic mentors are now gone. Hayden Carruth. Mark Strand. Philip Levine. And now Marvin Bell.…
Bob Hicok’s forthcoming collection of poetry Red Rover Red Rover with Copper Canyon Press (January 2021) is a treasure-house of irrational wordplay and imagistic plenitude. Hicok has staked his career across nine books and this, his tenth collection, reinforces his title as a master of idiom. He is the grand poobah of high and low speech. A modern guru of strange impulses and even more surprising associations.…
About the author: Susanna Peremartoni graduated in Miskolc and Budapest. From the age of 23, she lived in Darmstadt, Germany, as a ceramic assistant. She has exhibited in Helsinki and Vienna. She published her first volume in 2016 with Black Eagle Publisher (Budapest). In 2018 she produced a Hungarian and English recording of a jazz poetry CD at Origó Studio. The Hungarian CD is available at the Rózsavölgyi Music Store, the Wave Record Store and at the Plate Maker.…
About the author: Full name Peremartoni Nagy Zsuzsanna. Susanna Peremartoni graduated in Miskolc and Budapest. From the age of 23, she lived in Darmstadt, Germany, as a ceramic assistant. She has exhibited in Helsinki and Vienna. She published her first volume in 2016 with Black Eagle Publisher (Budapest). In 2018 she produced a Hungarian and English recording of a jazz poetry CD at Origó Studio.…
These poems traverse the coastal seasons with contemplative reflection. A canvas of emotion drawn from the colours of grief, loneliness, and gratitude. There is a certain fascination with the palette of nighttime and the musicality of being brought forth in the darkness.
The first several poems emerge from winter, human and animal reawakening their senses alongside the earth’s rebirth.…
I have to admit I was not prepared for how exquisite the first poem “Let Us For A Moment Call This Pain By Other Words” is in Dominik Parisien’s debut poetry collection Side Effects May Include Strangers out with McGill-Queen’s University Press. It is the kind of poem that, for a poet when you read it, it gives you an immediate sense of satisfaction, and also tendrils of envy which for me marks the quality of an excellent poem.…
[Note from Cynthia Sharp and Timothy Shay: “The Fire is our response to the forest fires that devour the Cascadia region in the overly hot summers resulting from climate change. It’s submitted exclusively to The Miramichi Reader with permission from both authors.”]
What was the name of the blaze that warmed you burned you scarred you lifted you as ash is lifted?…
“A town is a tin of children in an ocean,” writes Anna van Valkenburg in her debut poetry collection, a rich, unpredictable, and deeply surreal exploration of identity and the multiple contradictions we each embody. These poems, set in locations real and imaginary, magical and banal, inhabited by figures out of Slavic folklore and a Boschian landscape, strive to unearth truths, especially those that are difficult or uncomfortable, using Bertolt Brecht’s maxim “Do not fear death so much as an inadequate life” as a touchstone.…
About the author: Full name Peremartoni Nagy Zsuzsanna. Susanna Peremartoni graduated in Miskolc and Budapest. From the age of 23, she lived in Darmstadt, Germany, as a ceramic assistant. She has exhibited in Helsinki and Vienna. She published her first volume in 2016 with Black Eagle Publisher (Budapest). In 2018 she produced a Hungarian and English recording of a jazz poetry CD at Origó Studio.…
I became an instant fan of D.A. Lockhart’s poetry after reading 2019’s Devil in the Woods, a collection of “letters” addressed to famous Canadians such as Don Cherry, Lord Beaverbrook and Bruno Gerussi, to name a few. It was shortlisted for Best Poetry in 2020. Now with Tùkhòne, he combines haiku and haibun to create some of the most evocative prose and poetry I have read in some time.…
Author and poet Cynthia Sharp has submitted two of her newest poems, “The Temple of Trees” and “In an Evergreen Altar” written to Jilly Watson’s painting Sanctuary (see below) for a book they are collaborating on in future. They make their debut here in The Miramichi Reader.
The Temple of Trees
Tangerine path opens
to the universe,
empyrean resin made strong. …
Go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem.…
[A] rich, unpredictable, and deeply surreal exploration of identity and the multiple contradictions we each embody. These poems, set in locations real and imaginary, magical and banal, inhabited by figures out of Slavic folklore and a Boschian landscape, strive to unearth truths, especially those that are difficult or uncomfortable, using Bertolt Brecht’s maxim “Do not fear death so much as an inadequate life” as a touchstone.…
Susanna Peremartoni graduated in Miskolc and Budapest. From the age of 23 she lived in Darmstad, Germany, as a ceramic assistant. She has exhibited in Helsinki and Vienna. She published her first volume in 2016 with Black Eagle Publisher (Budapest). In 2018 she produced a Hungarian and English recording of a jazz poetry CD at Origó Studio. The Hungarian CD is available at the Rózsavölgyi Music Store, the Wave Record Store and at the Plate Maker.…
